That Old Feeling: Cooke's Tour

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In June 1968, to entertain his hostess on a visit to Los Angeles, he took her to the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was celebrating his victory in the California presidential primary. "Then. Above the bassy boom of the television there was a banging repetition of sounds. Like somebody dropping a rack of trays, or banging a single tray against a wall. Half a dozen of us were startled enough to head for the swinging doors, and suddenly we were jolted through by a flying wedge of other men. ... There was a head on the floor streaming blood, and somebody put a Kennedy boater under it, and the blood trickled down the sides like chocolate sauce on an iced cake. There were splashes of flash bulbs, and infernal heat, and the button eyes of Ethel Kennedy turned to cinders. She was wrestling or slapping a young man and he was saying, 'Listen, lady, I'm hurt, too.' And then she was on her knees cradling him briefly, and in another little pool of light on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child's effigy on a cathedral tomb. ... Everybody wanted to make space and air, but everybody also wanted to see the worst. By now, the baying and the moaning had carried over into the ballroom, and it sounded like a great hospital bombed and in panic."

He was an institution, yes, and as the decades mounted he dwelt more in reminiscence. But he was always a smart writer with an acute reportorial eye.



SKY WRITING

For much of my youth, I spent Sunday afternoons with Cooke. "Omnibus" was the TV show, and its host called it "the first 90-minute show in this country." That's not true: "Your Show of Shows" preceded "Omnibus" by a few years, and in prime time. But it was, as remains, unique as a showcase for the performing arts. A few highlights, from possibly-faulty memory: a dramatization of Arthur Miller's novel "Focus"; Gene Kelly demonstrating the manly art of ballet using professional athletes (Mickey Mantle, Bob Cousy); the U.S. premiere, before it opened in theaters, of Laurence Olivier's "Richard III"; Edward Albee's one-act play "The Sandbox" (well before his Broadway hit with "Virginia Woolf"); a short comedy film, about a schemer on a train, to the whimsical score of "Swedish Rhapsody."

Cooke's role, as ever, was moderator — between what audiences of the time thought they wanted and what he could persuade them they needed. High art wasn't big at our house; even mid-cult was scraping the ceiling. Opera, ballet, avant-garde theater were medicine to us, but when Cooke held out the spoonful of sugar, we yearned to learn. Decades hence, on "Masterpiece Theater," his presence was the seal of approval for some good, and some not-so-good, British TV. Again he spanned the Atlantic, ladling anecdotes and gentle opinions in graceful, sturdy prose he's probably composed minutes before taping.

Did Cooke ever have writer's block? I doubt it. He could spit out fine prose and cagey opinions, subtly voiced, on any subject — or on the same subject over and over. Consider these two descriptions of his hero Mencken. The first is from a "Letter," written on the occasion of Mencken's death in 1956 and reprinted in the 1968 anthology "Talk About America": "A little man, a stocky man with a bull neck, eyes as blue as gas jets, white hair parted exactly down the middle in the fashion of the early years of this century, and tiny hands and feet that added four surprising grace notes to the solid theme of his body, which was that of an undersized German pork butcher."

The second is from a longer profile in "Six Men," published in 1977: "I suppose I expected to see a florid giant, the local Balzac swiveling his huge bulk to bark at lackadaisical waiters. What I saw was a small man so short in the thighs that when he stood up he seemed smaller than when he was sitting down. He had a plum pudding of a body and a square head stuck on it with no intervening neck. His brown hair was parted exactly in the middle, and the two cowlicks touched his eyebrows. He had very light blue eyes small enough to show the white above the irises, which gave him the earnestness of a gas jet when he talked, an air of incredulity when he listened, and a merry acceptance of the human race and all its foibles when he grinned. He was dressed like the owner of a country hardware store. (On ceremonial occasions, I saw later, he dressed like a plumber got up for church.) For all his seeming squatness, his movements were precise, and his hands in particular were small and sinewy."

If Cooke had borrowed the early sketch for the later portrait, few readers would have noticed. Yet he created a new work, with fresh and vivid details. Did he even remember the 1956 paragraph when it came time to write the 1977? Perhaps he thought it less trouble to write a new, longer portrait than to look up the old one.



CREATING ALISTAIR COOKE

Alfred Cooke. Al Cooke. The names don't sing of cloistered halls and port wine the way Alistair does. But Alfred was his name when he was born, on November 20, 1908, to an iron fitter and his wife in the Manchester suburb of Salford. Along with his studies, the lad feasted, as so many young Brits did, on all things American: "bobbed hair and crossword puzzles, the yo-yo, fresh slang, jazz, electrical recording, the nights leaping with the best tunes of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Vincent Youmans, Rodgers and Hart, Ray Henderson and Gershwin."

He especially loved the bounding, stunt-strewn silent comedies of Douglas Fairbanks, which created for him the dream American, "whose delightful gift was to convert the walls and counters and turnstiles of the city into a gymnasium. ... This was my complete picture of America." So in 1917, when the Cookes took in GIs as boarders during the Great War, young Alfred got his first close look at representatives of the country he would live in and love. His infatuation for jazz never waned; he played it at Jesus College, Cambridge, frequented jazz clubs when he got to New York and, in the 50s, recorded an album of jazz piano.

At university, Cooke realized a tendency that would carry him through a long life: a wish to celebrate rather than cauterize. In his introduction to "Memories of the Great & the Good" (and how many other authors would have chosen that title without irony?), Cooke wrote: "My temperament was unhappy with the clinical scrutiny of I.A. Richards, then the helmsman of the New Wave in English studies at Cambridge. Too often, it seemed to me, he was determined to discover in a literary work what was phony or meretricious rather than what was admirable. So, I suppose, I can be said to have lapsed into the tradition of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's 'appreciative' criticism..." Cooke put his temperament to work when he came to America. He was the great appreciator of the country's breadth and energy, its strengths, ironies and contradictions.

It was at Cambridge that Alfred, now with ambitions to become the great theater director of his generation, created the character he would play for the rest of his life. He dubbed himself Alistair, traded in his homely Midlands accent for one closer to Mayfair, and cultivated a posh circle of friends. His supervisor, the critic Eustace M.W. Tillyard, graded Cooke as "Satisfactory, but a journalist's mind." If this was meant as an insult, it soon flowered into prophesy. In between earning his degree (summa cum laude) and co-founding the Mummers (Cambridge's first theatrical troupe to allow women as members), Cooke edited a campus literary magazine and wrote pieces for the American magazine Theatre Arts Monthly.

His eye had turned again across the sea. Horace Greeley's invocation "Go West, young man" applied to Cooke no less than to American pioneers. He was still smitten by the sight and the sound of America — its vigorous movie industry and its raw, enchanting popular music. Golf, his budding passion, was a Scottish sport, but the U.S. just then had a phenom, Bobby Jones, whom Cooke would lionize and often write about. Coming to America, then, was for this budding journalist like being assigned to cover Heaven from the inside.



SCREENING AMERICA

He crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 1932, on a Commonwealth scholarship that would take him to Yale and then Harvard. Sailing into New York Harbor, he saw the town's skyscrapers "piled up like the ramparts of some medieval city," as he told his listeners 20 years later. "And this, too, seemed right, for American spectacles — from the Grand Canyon to a night baseball crowd — are always (to a European, at least) bigger than life."

From youth, Cooke's fondness for America was intertwined with what he called "the great popular literature it more or less invented: the movies." He must have realized the truth of a broad generalization — theater is English, movies American — and, having thrown over his ambitions to be a theater director, became a movie critic. He wrote about the adolescent new medium with verve and without prejudice. He talked his way into a reviewer's job at BBC in 1935 and, two years later, edited a volume of film criticism, "Garbo and the Night Watchmen," which for the first time put the writing of Otis Ferguson, Cecelia Ager and Meyer Levin between hard covers.

And Alistair Cooke. If the biographical dish in his contribution comes in his regretful pan of "Modern Times" (just two years after working for Chaplin), the true test is in his dithyramb to Garbo — the great actress of her generation and the one who, inevitability, harvested a critic's ripest prose. ("What, when drunk, one sees in other women," Kenneth Tynan famously wrote, "one sees in Garbo sober.") Cook is in love with her, of course. But watch the writer tuck his attentiveness to behavioral detail into an imposing theory of life, love and the responsibility of the great to care for the merely good:

"Garbo's maturity is not the maturity of her career, it's a wise ageing of her outlook. The old, bold, slick disdain has given way to a sort of amused grandeur. ... For the new Garbo grandeur, this tolerant goddess wraps everybody in the film round in a protective tenderness. She sees not only her own life, but everyone else's, before it has been lived. ... And since the plot is now high hokum, the chief excitement is to watch how perfectly she now sees backwards, like a perpetually drowning woman, not only her life but her part ... the way — years ahead of the acting textbooks — she hides a broken moment not with a cute nose-dive into cupped palms, but with the five inadequate fingers of one bony hand. Her gestures, too, therefore, have the same tender calculation, the same anxiety to treat people with perhaps too much care at the moment, because she knows what's going to happen to them in a year or two."

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